Page 18 of A Steeping of Blood
Then it opened again, and Flick dove for Opal, her hands closing around air as the kitten disappeared too. And before she knew what was happening,shewas being dragged inside. A hand clamped around her mouth and the door closed again with a softsitch. Flick struggled, trying to make sense of where she was. It was too dark to decipher anything. It smelled of fish and rotting wood, like a place that hadbeen abandoned. It didn’t sound anything like it though. There was a cacophony of hushed voices and movement.
And then she was dragged to a halt into what felt to be the center of a room.
“Who—”
“Hush, love,” someone said. The voice came from somewhere ahead of her. “Don’t want Mother Dearest finding us.”
Flick’s heart leaped. She knew that voice.
A match hissed in the sudden silence and a lantern came to life, illuminating a room full of barrels and cargo chests. In the middle, legs dangling from either side of a crate, was a boy with ink-glossed hair and dark eyes, clothed in a tailored suit.
“Hello, Felicity,” Jin Casimir said, sly, smooth, and stunning as ever. “I’ve missed you.”
4JIN
The floppy, stinky fish had been Chester’s idea. While Jin was on the streets beating information out of every lead he could find, the three pint-size lordlings of Spindrift—Chester, Reni, and Felix—had been hard at work locating Flick. As well as Jin, and even Arthie.
Someone had to take charge, Chester had said with his arms crossed, when Jin snuck out of the empty schoolroom where he’d interrogated Coll and found the three of them waiting outside. They nearly caught the side of his umbrella when he thought they were Horned Guards.
You left us for an entire week, Felix added.
Alone, Reni said hollowly.
They’d been in the dark since that night at the Athereum hall, and had taken matters into their own hands.
As guilty as the words had made Jin feel, it wasn’t as thoughtheyhad gone through what he had. They looked at Jin as if this was just another Wednesday, when in reality, he had died.
He couldn’t look at the sky and celebrate a rare cloudless sky anymore. HeneededEttenia’s usual gloom. He couldn’t take a stroll and follow his nose to fresh, buttery pastries and sweet jam, no. His food was inside people.
He winced at that image. The last thing Jin remembered of his life was agreeing to become a vampire and Arthie sinking her fangs into his skin. When he woke on the Athereum floor amid fallen reporters and vampires and black-clad attackers alike, he was alone.
Arthie was gone. Matteo too. Flick and Laith and the kitten were nowhere to be seen. He was overwhelmed and ravenous, but the Athereum vampires were there.
They’d turned up their noses at him, except for Sidharth, Penn’s second-in-command. He’d helped him get clean and eventually fed. Jin didn’t know if he liked it. He could barely remember the night, but he hadn’t had another sip since.
“Jin?” Flick asked, aghast in the reeking storeroom.
Shewas different too. Jin had always thought Felicity Linden dazzled in a gown, but Felicity Linden in trousers and a shirt with neat lines? Wicked knives, it was something else. The tweed clung to her curves, pleats following the lines of her thighs. He would have expected every button of her shirt to be closed, but the top two were undone, framing a tiny splotch of her dark skin between the cream-colored fabric.
He couldn’t look away. He wanted to sweep toward her, hold her shy gaze, and lower his lips to that skin she’d bared to tease him. He wanted to feel the lush press of her lips against his again. To press his brow to hers and ask if she had missed him.
Chester cleared his throat.
Right.
“You’re bleeding,” Jin said, holding himself back from going to her aid. He didn’t trust himself yet.I’m not some feral beast. No, but he also didn’t know this new body as well as he would have liked. His strengths were still surprising him. On the floor between them, the kitten rolled over with the fish in her claws, back thumping against one of the many old crates stacked about.
Flick reached for her bleeding arm. He heard the hitch in her already labored breathing when she remembered. That he was no longer human. That he was a vampire. That he was what her mother absolutely loathed.
Reni understood, being a young vampire himself. “I have a kit. Sit, my lady. I will tend to it.”
It should have made Jin feel better, seeing how sure Reni was thathewouldn’t drink her dry, an indication that one day he would reach that point. But when Flick glanced at Jin with hesitation, it made something spike within him, a feeling he couldn’t quite place.
And to think, he would have known exactly what it was like to live and act and function as a vampire if Arthie had just thought to open her mouth and trust him.
Flick finally sat on one of the crates, the wood creaking under her weight. She tossed the curls out of her face and lifted her gaze to his. “You’re all right.”
Jin nodded.
